Why I started Tenve

Alex Softley

6/1/20262 min read

The first time I stood on an exhibition stand, I remember thinking this beats being stuck in an office. I was at Friends Life, a FTSE 100 company, working as a field marketer with a much grander business card: Corporate Promotions Consultant. My job was to help run the stand and pull in leads. The senior consultant I worked with had a trick she loved. She'd hire a caricaturist to draw people onto the stand, then quietly sit a salesperson next to them mid-sketch. If the conversation was flowing, the caricaturist slowed right down. If they weren't the right person, he sped up and moved them on. When that wasn't enough, we went bigger. One show we had sports stars on for a champagne hour. I won't say what it cost. Cheap it was not.

Then, in the last half hour of one show, a friend from uni came round the corner. She asked what I was up to and I told her I was desperate to get to London. She said she might be able to get me in at Centaur Media, working on exhibitions. Two months later I was there. I've loved the events industry ever since.

It took me a lot longer to work out what I'm actually good at.

A few years ago I was at a roundtable for event marketers. The host went round the table asking everyone their favourite part of marketing. One after another: email, social, content. Channels, mostly. I was last to answer. I said mine was getting inside the head of our audience, working out what they actually want, then building a strategy off the back of that.

A few people laughed.

It stuck with me, because of what it said about how a lot of event marketers and marketers in the events industry think. The channel is the comfortable bit. You can launch it this week and read the open rate by Friday. Research, segmentation, targeting, positioning, all of that is slower and less satisfying, so it gets skipped.

I've worked with stretched, genuinely hard-working event teams since then, and the problem is almost never effort. It's altitude. There's always another launch, another deadline, another campaign going live. That flow makes it hard to zoom out, and when you can't zoom out, strategy is the first thing to go. You start optimising for what's urgent instead of what matters, and a lot of businesses mistake that constant motion for progress.

Over a decade in, I know the part of this I care about most: diagnosing the problem, working out what a business actually needs, and figuring out how it grows. So this summer I'm launching Tenve, a marketing consultancy for event brands and businesses. (It's an anagram of "event," if you were wondering.)

The idea is to give people the space, strategic thinking and confidence to make better decisions, whether they're working with a £0 budget or £250k+. I've split the support into four areas: marketing audits, strategic projects and fractional CMO support, 1-2-1 coaching, and lead and demand generation.

I'm going to build Tenve in public, the highs and the lows. This newsletter is where most of that thinking will happen out loud: what's working, what isn't, and the ideas I'd put in front of any marketer or leader who wants marketing to earn its place commercially.

That roundtable answer is still the thing I believe most. Strategy first, execution second. If that resonates, hit reply and tell me where your marketing's stuck right now. I read every one.

Get in touch with Tenve today:

alex@tenve.co.uk